Sunday, March 26, 2023

BRETT STEENBARGER'S TRADING PSYCHOLOGY RESOURCE CENTER


Contact For Trading Firms and Media:  steenbab at aol dot com

My Twitter Feed:  @steenbab

RADICAL RENEWAL - Free blog book on trading, psychology, spirituality, and leading a fulfilling life

---

The Three Minute Trading Coach Videos

---

Forbes Articles:


My coaching work applies evidence-based psychological techniques (see my background and my book on the topic) to the improvement of productivity, quality of life, teamwork, leadership, hiring best practices, and creativity/idea generation.  Trading firms, teams, and portfolio managers interested in performance coaching and help with hiring processes can email me at steenbab at aol dot com.  Please note that my work is limited to trading and investment firms, so I cannot provide online advice or coaching services to individual, independent traders


FURTHER RESOURCES




I wish you the best of luck in your development as a trader and in your personal evolution.  In the end, those are one and the same:  paths to becoming who we already are when we are at our best.

Brett
.

Understanding Market Themes From Sector Breadth

 

For years, I have kept breadth data on the overall stock market, tracking shares making fresh highs and lows over various periods and the percentages of stocks trading above their short, medium, and longer-term moving averages.  What I've found is that shifts in breadth often precede shifts in overall market direction.  This is because certain parts of the market will break down or rebound ahead of the market averages.  Conversely, during trending moves, we will see the great majority of shares participate in market rises or declines.  The breadth extremes are an excellent alert for overall market momentum.

This is a good example of how trading psychology is about the market's psychology, not just about our personal emotions and behaviors.  Breadth data are helpful in tracking changes in the sentiment of market participants.  

Recently, I have built out spreadsheets that track breadth on a sector by sector basis, as well as breadth for various factors such as small cap vs. large cap and growth vs. value.  The idea is that the patterning of breadth changes among the sectors helps us track market themes.  

So let's take an example from the recent market (data from the excellent Barchart site):

In the last two trading sessions of the past week, the overall SPX moved higher by almost 1%.  Overall short-term breadth (stocks trading above their five-day moving averages), rose from about 26% to about 45%.  Interestingly, over that same time, the same breadth for consumer discretionary stocks went from about 20% to 25%.  The breadth for consumer staples shares went from 27% to 85%.  The breadth of energy stocks went from 61% to 22%; the breadth of financial shares went from 25% to 17% and the breadth of utility stocks rose from 0% to 73%.  

This tells us several important things:

1)  The move higher has not been a broad trending move.  It is quite mixed.

2)  The move higher has benefited more defensive sectors (consumer staples, utilities) and not sectors that reflect economic growth (consumer discretionary, energy).

3)  The recent reassurances regarding the banking sector of the economy have not yet pushed financial shares meaningfully higher.

When we couple the pattern of market breadth with the movement of interest rates (lower), we again see defensive buying (bonds).  Interestingly, large cap tech stocks have similarly acted as a relative safe haven, with breadth over the past two sessions moving from 26% to 54%.

The bottom line is that the patterning of breadth reflects a defensive market with lower rates, suggesting concerns regarding recession.  In tracking breadth going forward, I will want to see if the recessionary hypothesis/theme gains traction or reverses.  The shifts in the patterning of breadth among equities, as well as the shifts among asset classes and geographic regions, allow us to update our forecasts for markets and economies.  This enables us to be open-minded and flexible, even as we assertively pursue themes in play.

Further Reading:

.

Sunday, March 19, 2023

Making Passion Your Purpose

 
This post begins with a music video, old concert footage of Neil Young and company doing "Like a Hurricane".  It's a great song, but the important thing is to watch Neil during the two extended guitar solos.  This is not someone playing a song; it's the song playing itself through him.  The passion with which he plays is tangible.  Living life passionately is not easy, but as Neil observed, "It's better to burn out than to fade away".

A lot of us are fading away.  We're doing the same things.  We do the same things the same way and glorify it as "discipline" and "process".  We focus on working harder until we forget how to truly play.  We track all that we do in efforts at improvement until little is left to spontaneity.  If we approached romantic relationships the way the approach markets, we would quickly lose all passion and life together would become little more than a well-oiled routine.

If we are to make passion our purpose, then we have to make time for the new and different:  new experiences, fresh perspectives, expanded relationships, and opportunities to truly feel what we're doing.  The challenge of peak performance is maintaining the spirit and energy of what we're doing even as we work on improvement and mastery.  That is why the practice sessions of great teams--athletic teams, military teams--combine exercises that rouse motivation and teamwork with exercises that build skills.  Go into any locker room at halftime:  the great teams will fire themselves up, not unlike Neil Young's absorption in his music.

Wanting to make money is not passion.  Filling out trading journals and reviewing performance is not passion.  All these are necessary, but not sufficient for peak performance.  Passion comes from absorbing ourselves in what we love.

What do you love about markets?  How can you so absorb yourself in that love that your trading takes on the quality of Neil Young's guitar solos?  

Or are you working so hard to take emotion out of your trading that your trading career is fast-becoming a passionless romance?

This past week I've created a historical database of breadth statistics for a wide variety of market sectors, so that it's possible to see where money is flowing in and out of the market--and then backtest the significance of such shifts.  That is leading to new discoveries--new ways of detecting market regime changes in real time--and that fires up the passion.  More to come--

Further Reading:

Passion, Purpose, and Why Traders Fail

.

Saturday, March 11, 2023

Broad Stock Market Selloff: What Comes Next?

 
If everyone agreed on the value of an asset, there would be no price movement.  When price movement becomes volatile, we know that there is meaningful disagreement regarding value.  This was an important dynamic in the stock market this past week.  Let's see if we can look at the market from a data-driven perspective and gain some insight into what was going on--and what that could mean going forward.

The first important piece of information was that the past week's selloff was indeed broad.  Consider the following:  Out of the 500 stocks in the SPX average, the number making five-day new lows minus the number making five-day new highs was 442, and the number making twenty-day new lows minus new highs was 331.  The percentage of stocks in the SPX universe closing above their five-day moving averages was 1.98.  Only a little over 6% of stocks closed above their five-day averages.  Everything.  Was.  Weak.

The second important piece of information was that trading following the news of the SVB failure significantly differed from the trading up to that point.  Prior to the news, we were seeing weak stocks and weak bonds, as traders feared that inflation would be "sticky" and that the Federal Reserve Bank would need to raise rates more than expected earlier.  Following the news, selling became much more intense.  We saw elevated volume, elevated implied volatility readings (VIX), and elevated negative NYSE TICK numbers.  Indeed, the first tell that the SVB news was a game changer was the persistent TICK readings below -1000.  That can only occur when there is aggressive selling of large baskets of stocks.

The third important piece of information was that correlations within and across markets shifted dramatically.  Financial shares, such as those making up the XLF ETF, aggressively led the downside.  Fixed income, which had been trading lower in anticipation of higher yields, became a safe haven and rallied aggressively.  The market's narrative had changed from strong economy/inflation/higher rates to bank failure/economic uncertainty.  It would have been difficult for market participants to detect this regime change if they were not tracking volatility, volume, breadth, and market correlations.

So what might follow from such a selloff?  I went to my breadth database, which goes back to 2010, and I identified all occasions in which over 400 of the SPX 500 stocks closed at five-day lows and over half closed at 20-day lows.  Out of 3298 market days, only 38 met these criteria.  In other words, such broad selloffs have been rare.  Interestingly, instances of these selloffs have tended to cluster.  We had four occasions in early 2020; four in late 2018; three in August of 2015; and seven from August to November, 2011.  Across all 38 instances, there was a tendency to bounce the next day (24 up, 14 down for an average gain of +.93% vs. +.03% for the rest of the sample).  By ten days later, there was no upside edge whatsoever.  What was striking was that, over the next ten days, the market moved up or down more than 4% on fifteen of the occasions.  In other words, volatility tended to persist; direction was a crapshoot.

There is a temptation among short-term traders to look for bounces in assets that are oversold.  The problem with this idea is that we need to understand *why* we have gotten to such an oversold point.  The recent market activity has been abnormal.  That is why only a little more than 1% of days since 2010 have shown such weakness.  When a bank is at risk of failing and other banks are moving lower in sympathy, the result is a level of volatility that tells us that investors are questioning underlying value.  The first step in charting a trading or investing strategy is to recognize that we have entered relatively uncharted waters.  Trading with "discipline" and blindly following the "setups" and ideas from earlier this month is dangerous indeed.

Further Reading:

Using Breadth and Strength to Track Market Cycles

.  

Sunday, March 05, 2023

The Most Important Factor in Successful Relationships

 

As I emphasized in the Trading Psychology 2.0 book, research in psychology is clear that we are most productive, creative, and successful when we experience high levels of happiness, fulfillment, energy, and closeness to others.  This is an important reason why burnout is such a risk in high performance fields.  Once we prioritize tasks over our well-being, we drain ourselves of the very things that we need to be at our best.  Imagine if someone cared about you and said, "I want to spend more time with you" and you responded, "I don't have time for you!"  That would never happen in a truly loving relationship, but it's basically how many of us relate to ourselves.  

Abraham Maslow, the well-known psychologist, made the distinction between deficit needs and being needs.  A deficit need is one in which I try to fill something missing in myself.  For example, if I don't feel that I am lovable as I am, I may seek a partner who is so needy that they will stay with me.  I am filling a gap in my life--and in my self-esteem.  If I am secure and want to maximize my life, I will seek a partner for their values, strengths, and achievements.  Indeed, in a good relationship, a partner typically possesses strengths that we lack.  That is how relationships make us better:  we absorb the positive qualities of who we are with.  If, however, I'm threatened by the strengths of the other person, I will respond to them with insecurity and defensiveness and, eventually, the relationship will fail.

Good relationships are built on a foundation of positives.  Unsuccessful relationships are fundamentally self-focused, using other people to (vainly) fill our gaps.  When we seek out people based on their needs, their growth and development become threats to us.  That is how many marriages end.

This is as true in work relationships as personal ones.  A great hire for a team is someone who makes everyone else better with unique skills and experience.  A secure manager looks for people who make them better; an insecure manager looks for people who won't leave them.  A secure leader celebrates the successes of others; an insecure manager responds with envy.

The most important factor in successful relationships is the desire to find people who are better than us in some areas of life.  We become who we surround ourselves by.  Our approach to relationships can either become an engine of growth or a prison of insecurity.

Further Reading:

Our Relationships Shape Our Relationship With Ourselves

.    

Sunday, February 26, 2023

The Most Common Weakness I Observe Among Traders

 
There is a myth among developing traders that all you need to do for success is find a style of trading that fits your personality and then stick to that style with discipline and consistency.

What nonsense.

Consider other performance domains, such as basketball or surgery or opera singing.  Does a basketball team stick with a single defensive style regardless of the competition?  Do surgeons follow techniques based upon their personalities or based on objective scientific data?  Do professional singers adopt the same style to every composition they perform? 

The reality is that high performance professionals learn to adapt their styles to the conditions of performance.  A tennis player adapts to clay and grass courts.  A football team adapts to changing defensive alignments.  Actors adapt to their roles.

The most common weakness I observe among traders is that they seek a style of trading and attempt to fit that style into all market conditions.  For example, a trader may seek to profit from trend or momentum, only to become frustrated when markets are "choppy"  A trader may seek to trade one time frame when market cycles operate on very different scales.

My favorite analogy for this situation is the dancer who has a single style of dancing regardless of the music playing.  While everyone else is slow-dancing to a waltz, they are thrashing about, mosh-pit style.  Then they wonder why no one will dance with them...

The first question a trader must ask is not about "setups" and what is moving.  The first question is:  How is this market behaving and does that behavior present opportunities that I can exploit?  Before you start dancing, you listen to the music.  Before you begin surgery, you study the patient's condition.

Having a single style that you impose across all markets is not discipline; it is inflexibility.  Some of the best market opportunities come from occasions when trades that had been working suddenly don't work.  That can be a wonderful heads-up that conditions have changed and that it's time to adapt.

Further Reading:

The Challenge of Adapting to Changing Markets

.

Sunday, February 19, 2023

Reaching Your Goals Through Gentle Power

 

In her remarkable book Gentle Power, Emilia Elisabet Lahti describes how true leadership requires an integration of strength and power on one hand and love and gentleness on the other.  The combination of these qualities creates a trait known in Finland as sisu.  It is through sisu that we are able to persevere under challenging conditions, transcending fatigue and frustration to find our emotional and spiritual second wind.  A while back, I wrote an article pertinent to sisu, citing the mixed martial arts accomplishments of Kyle Maynard, who was born without arms and legs.  Interestingly, Maynard practiced for his bouts by mentally rehearsing all his anxieties and fears in advance.  By training himself to face his greatest fears, he built his mental strength.

Lahti would view this as an excellent example of gentle power:  facing adversity, but in a manner that is supportive and constructive.  In the Gentle Power book, she describes her incredible 50-day running journey across New Zealand, in which she ran the equivalent of a marathon each day.  She was accompanied by a single trainer and otherwise faced each day in solitary contemplation.  On the twelfth day of the journey, she was overcome with pain and swelling.  As she ran, the insight came to her, "The pain ends when you make it end".  She realized that, all her life, it had been easier for her to be hard on herself than merciful.  That insight led her to take a break from the run, allow herself to heal, and ultimately finish the route.  She found a way to persevere:  by supporting herself.

How relevant this idea is for all of us who participate in performance activities.  Our very achievement orientation and desire to win make it easier for us to be hard on ourselves than supportive.  The idea is not to give up on our quest; nor is it to allow our quest to drive ourselves into the ground.  Only through the sisu of gentle power can we find ways to move forward that also take care of us.  As Lahti points out, this is tremendously important for leadership.  As a team, we must push ourselves, but in ways that preserve teamwork and the bonds of mutual support.

Our life is our ultramarathon quest.  Whether and how we finish will depend upon our power--and our gentleness.

Further Reading:


.

Sunday, February 12, 2023

Our Physical Experience Shapes Our Mindset

 
In a recent post, I highlighted the role of physical experience in our psychological states.  That post raised a fascinating possibility:

Could it be the case that, just as we read others through their "body language", we process our experiences of ourselves through our bodily states?  What if we are continuously reading our own body language and internalizing what we're reading as our self-image, self-concept, and self-esteem? 

Most of us are familiar with the cognitive framework in which what we think influences how we feel.  There is undeniable importance to this perspective.  If we immerse ourselves in negative self-talk, it's inevitable that we will feel anxious, depressed, frustrated, and resentful.  Equally important is the observation that we are much more likely to lapse into negative self-talk when we lack energy and vitality.  

Suppose we are trying to grow a beautiful garden.  We could select the best flowers and plants and plant the best seeds we can find.  Ultimately, however, the garden will not thrive unless we attend to the soil and water.  What is good for the roots ultimately shapes the beauty of the flowers.

Most psychology is "top-down":  change your behavior by changing your mind.

What if, however, we are more like the garden and need to grow from "bottom-up"?

The important insight in the above quote is that "we are continuously reading our own body language and internalizing" our experience.  Is there a relationship between how we move our bodies and our mood?  Our energy level?  Is there a relationship between how we breathe and how we experience the world?  Is there a relationship between the strength and flexibility of our bodies and our overall energy level and life perspective?

When we are trapped in negative habit patterns, might those be the result of our imprisonment in routine physical states?

Can we expect to have a fresh and energized trading psychology when our bodies are sitting inertly for hours at a time, staring at screens?

If we want to change our mindset, perhaps the most important question is, "What can I be doing right here, right now, to produce the mindset I want?"  We change by doing.  We become our experience:  that is our water and soil.

Further Reading:

Using Our Bodies to Program Our Minds

Body as Gateway to Mind

Renewing Mind by Renewing Body

.

Sunday, February 05, 2023

What is the Path to Your Greatness?

 

Many traders long for great profits.  How many do truly great things to achieve those profits?  If you were to do the things that would earn unusually positive returns, you would be doing unique things--you would be far from consensus.  You would have unique ways of generating ideas and managing the positions based on those ideas. You would have an ongoing pipeline of projects to get better and better and exploit new and different market conditions.  You would not be a one-trick pony making money in bull or bear markets or in conditions of volatility.  You would cultivate ways of succeeding across many market conditions.

Most importantly, great people don't magically achieve their status.  Their greatness comes from doing unique and special things each day, each week.  I invite you to read this older post:  It asks the important question, "How can people experience themselves greatly if there's no single thing during the day that they undertake in an exemplary way?"

Greatness does not come from working harder at routine activities.  It comes from expanding ourselves beyond those routines.  Creative geniuses by definition operate outside the box in much of what they do.  Because they pursue what speaks to them, they are able to achieve unusual levels of absorption and productivity, fueling the development of expertise

What speaks to you?  What are the little things you do greatly?  You will find your greatest success by building upon the exemplary things you already do with passion and uniqueness.

Further Reading:

The Role of Creative Insight in Trading

.

Sunday, January 22, 2023

Changing Your Trading Psychology By Changing Your Body

 
A fascinating finding from research in psychology is that lasting changes in thought, feeling, and behavior require processing of our experience in states of heightened emotional arousal.  When we are in novel modes of consciousness, we become more open to new ways of viewing ourselves and the world.  One of the most powerful gateways to shifts in our states of awareness is the body.  We see this in meditation, yoga, and hypnosis.  We also see this principle at work in psychotherapy, when the enhanced emotional experience of a relationship with a therapist helps us get in touch with feelings and opens the door to new perspectives on ourselves.  Think about visualization exercises in behavioral work or self-talk exercises in cognitive therapy.  We change our viewing by shifting our doing.

Of course, we don't need to be in therapy to enhance our states of awareness and our physical states.  Indeed, there is much to be said for using our physical states during the day to keep ourselves from falling into the ruts of routine.  Research in psychology tells us that high levels of positive emotional experience (well-being) are essential to optimal productivity and creativity.  An important dimension of well-being is our energy level.  We cannot expect to be dynamic people or performers living in static bodies.

Many of our most successful change efforts begin with the body.  We can use our bodies to program our minds, as in biofeedback and self-hypnosis, enabling us greater access to our "gut" intuitions.  In a prior post, I noted that what we internalize is much more a function of what we do than what we say and think.  How we move the body greatly impacts our psychology.  Think about how different kinds of dance impact our experience; think about how we use anchoring to cement new behaviors.  Across the great religious and spiritual traditions of the world, we see how the body is a gateway to change, as in the case of fasting and shifting the body during prayer.

In her insightful and practical book Body Aware, Erica Hornthal, a licensed therapist and dance therapist, explains how utilizing the body to promote change is not just about physical exercise.  How we move--from hour to hour and day to day--greatly impacts our experience of ourselves.  "It is through the body that permanent change occurs, ultimately bringing new patterns of thought and speech...We must address how the body is wired, or in some cases 'miswired,' to fundamentally rewire the mind.  A body that is stretched by new experiences changes the mind's dimensions forever" (p. 74).    

Could it be the case that, just as we read others through their "body language", we process our experiences of ourselves through our bodily states?  What if we are continuously reading our own body language and internalizing what we're reading as our self-image, self-concept, and self-esteem?  As traders, we could be religiously keeping journals, studying markets, and collaborating with others, but if we are physically inert, not eating well, and not getting optimal sleep, can we expect to be truly open to fresh learning from our reviews and teamwork?  We can set goals and push for greater performance, but if we're experiencing ourselves as static and constrained, will we ever truly internalize the right mindsets?  As Erica Hornthal notes, a resilient mindset begins with a resilient body.

Further Reading:

Radical Renewal - The Spirituality of Trading

.

Saturday, January 14, 2023

What Does Recent Stock Market Strength Tell Us?

 

I've found that if you look at enough market indicators, you'll always find reasons to be long or short, and you'll always find reasons to trade.  Far better than following a host of canned indicators is constructing a select number of measures that make sense to you and then learning (and backtesting) their ins and outs.  Chasing multiple rabbits is a great way to wind up with none.

Kudos to the SentimenTrader service, which consistently offers excellent research for equity traders and investors.  They recently highlighted the upward breadth thrust in the market--a situation in which many stocks go from being oversold to overbought in a relatively short period of time--and noted the historical tendency for such moves to continue higher.  A common scenario that explains the pattern is that bears miss the market bottom and then miss the initial thrust higher and so view pullbacks as opportunities to ride the new trend.  That keeps pullbacks relatively modest and helps to create a trending move higher.

One of my favorite indicators comes from data offered by the Stock Charts site and their scans.  Each day I track how many stocks in the NYSE universe closed above and below their upper and lower Bollinger Bands.  When many stocks close above their respective bands, that tells you that there is unusual strength--and it is broad.  

Just in the past week alone, we've had three days in which over 400 stocks closed above their upper bands.  To put this into perspective, since 2019, when I first began archiving these data, there have only been 15 prior occasions of individual days with over 400 stocks closing above their bands.  Such days of strength are rare--and now we're seeing a cluster of such strong days.  Somewhat similar clusters occurred in June and November of 2020; both led to higher prices in the medium term.  Indeed, following the 15 occasions of breadth strength, SPY was higher 11 times, lower 4 times over the next 20 trading sessions.  Average gains were +2.45% vs. +.85% for the remainder of the sample.  Interestingly, following the strong days, there has been no significant directional edge over the following five trading sessions.  It's not unusual to get some consolidation before the trend resumes.

I'm currently working on an intraday breadth thrust model to see how well it anticipates short-term patterns of momentum.  That will require a new and different indicator and perhaps a new way of thinking about breadth.  This could open the door to intraday measures of breadth thrust.  

We hear a lot about traders' "edge" in the markets.  Edges, I've found, are always evolving--and the successful traders are the ones who evolve along with markets.  As an increasing amount of capital is being traded by highly leveraged funds, we're finding a growing number of portfolio managers managing risk on a short-term basis.  This is creating shorter-term patterns of momentum and reversal that can be exploited by nimble traders employing the right tools.  

Further Reading:


.